Alright, the main plot points are still the same. The blurb that’s already posted on this website is still wholly and perfectlyvalid. But I threw out that stupid outline that’s been suffocating me from day one.

Didn’t I just say that outlining is important for sequels like two or three blog posts ago? Yes, yes I did. And I stick by that statement. But that only works if you wrote a good outline in the first place. I’m here to tell you, this one was garbage.

If you follow me on Twitter you’re probably aware that I took a machete to my more-than-half-finished draft a while back and I’ve been building it back up. Most of what I axed at the time was related the to the villain I hated oh-so-much and the utterly failed attempt at using him as a pseudo love interest. That didn’t work out for all kinds of reasons, primarily because Penelope wasn’t having it (I don’t blame her) and I just couldn’t make the guy likable.

But that still left me with a heap of things I didn’t like, and a whole big section that feels like a Regency Romance novel that makes me want to beat my head against a wall. It isn’t anything against the genre. I’ve read quite a few that I enjoy (a bunch of things by Johanna Lindsey come to mind). The problem is that writing in that way made my female characters feel very vapid to me, and it’s really the antithesis of the personas I built for Penny and Tiffany in Saving the Dragon. I have no idea how other authors manage to write strong female characters in such a setting. More power to them, honestly. If you have any tips to leave in the comments I’m all ears.

So, for the time being, that section I’m unhappy with is still technically part of the draft. I expect it to bleed red in the first round of hard revisions. Like, big red X’s and all new scenes scribbled on the back and in the margins. There’s a plot point in there I somehow need to keep, and I have a few ideas about how to do it dancing in my head. BUT. That is a problem for future me. I’ve promised myself no more big cuts before the last line of the first(ish) draft has been written.

So, what did I do about the plot?

I went back to who my characters are.

Penelope isn’t someone who waits around for someone else to come up with a solution. To quote her in one of her new scenes: “Have you ever known me to sit in a tower and wait for rescue?” And yet, I had her doing exactly that for a substantial part of the very early draft. Some of the things I had her doing were so appalling out of character that it made it impossible to do anything with her.

Don’t even get me started on what Salarath was up to. Let me just say, sulking is not a good look on him.

Getting reacquainted with my heroes put a few things in sharp perspective for me, and made doing a few more surgical removals (prior to the no-more-big-cuts-vow) a simple matter. I graphed on some new scenes to replace what I’d sliced away, and suddenly some things fell into place nicely, because Penny and her dragon were acting like themselves again. Whew.

From that point, I decided to take a road somewhere between the complete and utter pantsing that I did for Saving and the tightly constrained outline I initially did for Courting. My characters were at point A, but I knew they needed to get to B, C, and D before I could even think about writing the finale. So, I noted B, C, and D, and then just let the characters take me to them.

Do I have a few crap transition scenes that are totally going under the knife in first revisions later this month? Abso-frickin’-lutely.

Am I a thousand times happier than I was with this draft a month ago? You have no idea.

When I finished my first round of big tear-outs, I’d taken the draft down from over 50k to ~43k words. I’m now coming up on 70k again (probably more by the time this post actually goes live). At this rate, Courting may very well end up being almost twice as long as its predecessor. I ain’t mad about that. I don’t think everyone who has been looking forward to this book will be either.

I think it may be time to accept that I’m not a traditional outliner. I do need to take notes like nobody’s business because I will forget the neat little plot twists I had in store. Or I’ll forget some detail about my magic system I had intended to work in. Or whatever. I had all kinds of things planned for book three, but I didn’t write them down, so now I’m having to try and remember what they were. I’ve now started my notes file for book three now precisely because of this. But it’s just that, notes. It seems that a more free-form approach of just random bullet points in a Google doc works best for me.

The truth is, with only one completed long-form work under my belt, I’m still learning what exactly my process is. But I think that the moral of this story is you are NOT married to an outline (unless of course, you signed a contract stating that you are and you owe it to some big publishing house, then I’m both sorry for you and extremely jealous). If your outline isn’t working for you, throw it away. Start over. Get back in touch with who your characters are and the story they are trying to tell. Then write a new outline if you’re someone who needs the structure. Or don’t if you’re really a total pantser. But don’t stick with an outline you’ve come hate.

General Progress Update

I’m now very confident about getting the first(ish) draft of Courting finished this month. I had hoped to be done around the last weekend of January, but doing the editing on my first video book review turned out to be waaaay more time consuming than I anticipated, partly because I was trying to learn new software. To complicate things further, I’m now dealing with some hand and wrist issues that I’m hoping aren’t a big red flag for worse things yet to come. So that is slowing down my progress a bit from the rapid movement I was making before. Still, being well into revisions by the middle of February remains realistic, despite my hand and wrist pain. Fortunately, I revise on a printed draft, so that will give my left hand a nice break.

With that confidence about finishing the draft, I am now also ready to say that I am targeting a summer 2018 release for Courting the Dragon. I do have an exact date in mind, but I’m not quite ready to share it since these pain issues are cropping up and *cramping* my style (get it? get it?). As I get into revisions and get the second(ish) draft out to beta readers it will become more obvious whether or not that date is feasible. Start looking for an official launch announcement around March.

About the Author

Rose is the municipal liason for the Akron regional group for National Novel Writing Month. She and her husband and active participants in the yearly challenge. They live in Northeast Ohio with their two cats, Athos and Achilles. You can find Rose on Facebook.

Details

The book is available from Amazon. The ebook edition is 99 cents, and the paperback is $12.99. The Kindle edition is estimated at about 241 pages.

Design

I like the cover. It isn’t a knock-you-down WOW cover, but it looks like the sort of cover I would expect for a sweet (read: no smutt) romance novel. The script font for the word “Soul” is a nice touch. I’m not crazy about the other font (the random slanted letters are weird to me), but there is a nice balance to it. The colors seem to be a bit washed out, but that’s not a big deal. I don’t see issues with consistency between the cover and the contents of the book. So, if this section were just the cover alone we’d be looking at 3, maybe 4 teaspoons.

But, we are not just looking at the cover. Things take a bit of left turn once you crack open the book.

To put it bluntly, the ebook formatting is a mess. It’s missing page breaks. There are line breaks in random places. The header for the Acknowledgements lost its styling somewhere along the way. At times the formatting problems were so distracting I actually had trouble concentrating on the story.

HOWEVER.

I spoke with the author about it, suspecting there may have been issues with the file that was uploaded. These issues may be resolved by the time this review is live.

The other thing on the inside that gets me is the treehouse picture just inside the cover. I actually really enjoy pictures and art in books I read. But rather than a gorgeous sketch of the house that Eddie lovingly designed, we get what looks like a stock clip-art image of a kid’s tree fort. Rather than adding to the romance of the book, this really distracts from it.

Two teaspoons.

Premise

The book description on Amazon is extremely brief. It reads more like a split second elevator pitch than a full book blurb, and really doesn’t give any insight to what sort of story the reader should expect.

My best attempt at summing up the premise would be this: a teenage ranch hand falls in love with the long-lost granddaughter of the woman who owns the ranch his family has worked on for three generations. Over the course of the summer, he works to protect her from her conniving uncle and prove his love. And there’s a treehouse.

There’s some nugget of interesting in this idea. At first blush there’s definitely some room for intrigue and action. So, despite the lack of clarity up front on the premise, it’s not a bad one. Three teaspoons.

Characters

Edward Goldman aka Eddie, is our main protagonist. Eddie is supposedly sixteen (and later eighteen), but it feels more like he’s twelve. Despite his attempts to “man-up” so to speak, Eddie really just comes off as childish.

Another major character is Nicole. She is the granddaughter of the ranch owner, Ms. Anne Morgan. I can’t quite figure Nicole out. At first, she acts convinced that everyone is lying to her and insists that the antagonist is her father. Then later she talks about her parents like she knew all along he wasn’t. She does have a pretty badass moment where she torches the bad guy’s house. It was definitely one of the more intense scenes in the book.

The main antagonist of the story is Anne’s son, Judd. He’s a nasty SOB, just like his father. Somebody really should have just shot the rat bastard early in the book and put us all out of his misery. In summary, he kidnapped his niece and tortured her for years, planning to eventually use her to get his mother’s ranch. Or something. Most of his time on camera in the first half is spent trying to shoot Eddie. Why Judd is the way he is doesn’t get explored much. His motivation is muddy at best.

These are just the main characters. There’s a whole host of side characters in the form of Eddie’s family. Honestly, I think the story would have fared better if the cast had been trimmed down significantly. All these names and their relation to the hero of the story are just noise. Uncle Eric is an extraneous character. He didn’t need to be there. Anything he might have done, Uncle Buck could have done. Billy seemed to be used to give Eddie a chance for exposition, and that also feels throw-away. I’m also not sure why Anne needed five sons. Two or three in opposition to each other would have been enough. Robert and Clint could have been combined into one character, as could Chester and Wade.

Characters get two teaspoons.

Worldbuilding

Seeing as this story is, presumably, set in the real world the act of worldbuilding lies more in grounding the reader in a time and place. Soul Mates fails at this is a big way for me.

When and where on Earth does this story take place? Apparently, the action is split between 1996 and 1998. This wasn’t immediately apparent to me since the “December 1998” heading from the Prologue was crammed onto the page before with the title, copyright, dedication, and acknowledgments. I was halfway through the book before I figured out what year it was. All I knew was that it was sometime after Henry Ford popularized the assembly line because there were several trucks.

The town’s name is Duncan, but where Duncan is, I’m not sure. It seems to have some laws that don’t feel quite reasonable in a modern era. Castle laws and stand-your-ground laws (statutes that allow you to shoot home invaders or someone who is attacking you) are still fairly common in the U.S., but they certainly are stricter than what this story depicts.

It seems like guns in general are a bit misrepresented in the story. The second scene where Judd tries and fails to shoot Eddie feels wildly inaccurate. And this is coming from someone who has actually shot a gun. Several of them, in fact. I don’t know the exact statistics, but unless Judd takes really crappy care of his gun and ammo that many misfires seem highly unlikely. Also, seems like Eddie sure recovered from not one, but two gun wounds awful fast.

If this seems nitpicky, it’s because things like this can jar a reader and make them doubt the feasibility of the rest of the story. The book blurb touts the story as being unbelievable, and these worldbuilding miscues make it that for all the wrong reasons.

Worldbuilding gets one teaspoon.

Plot

Okay, so it got off to a rocky start, but that premise was good, so how did that play out in the plot? All the best romances stories, in my opinion, have a great overarching plot and conflict that serve as the backdrop for the romance. The love story is an organic outcome of the circumstances facing the main characters.

That didn’t happen in Soul Mates. Eddie just falls in love with Nicole for absolutely no apparent reason at first sight right after she’s been beaten bloody and nearly to death. I guess I could see some protector instincts kicking in, but love? Seems a stretch. He then devotes himself to her, again for no apparent reason, and proceeds to spend several pages pining over her after she (initially) resoundingly rejects him. Nicole at least seems to have the sense to get to know someone before declaring undying love.

Things get even weirder after the two-year time jump back to 1998.

Then there’s Judd. Why on earth does Judd have so much clout? Why wouldn’t they ask for a trial in a neutral location if it’s known that the local judge is friendly to Judd? Both the federal and state courts in the US have procedures for this kind of thing. Where’s the District Attorney when all this is going down? Is it really the DA that Judd has in his pocket? How does a man that lives in a trash heap afford that kind of respect?

It feels like the story wants to be an old western in a mining town, but with the modern convenience of farm trucks. The story makes one leap in logic to the next. I found it very hard to follow. I’m still trying to figure out why the treehouse was safer than the ranch house, other than maybe Judd wouldn’t look there? I don’t know.

One teaspoon for the plot.

Writing

There was some good and some bad here. There are moments of evocative imagery such as “In the summer, the trees would be laden with fruit and they would scent the air with a sweet fragrance; but now, the trees were bare and the only smell that filled the air was the stench of manure from cows in the pasture.”

There were definitely a few miscues. I honestly spent probably the first eight chapters trying to figure out what was going on in this story. The prologue seemed to be trying to make use of a framing technique that shows a bit of the future, then jumps back in time for the start of chapter one. I do enjoy this framing technique, but the book doesn’t indicate that time jump well. I think the story would have been stronger either without that prologue. It didn’t really add anything for the reader, in my opinion. I’m not normally a fan of exposition-y prologues, but I think even that would have been better, considering the struggle I had figuring out who was who and what the heck they had to do with the ranch.

The first part of the story that mostly told from Eddie’s first-person point of view also seems like a miss to me. I feel like this was not the best choice of narrating voice for this story. It’s not that a romance can’t be told from a young man’s first-person perspective, it’s just that there’s so much information that the reader might have benefited from that would have better been explained outside of Eddie’s head and his maturity level does not add to the believability of the story as a romance.

Overall

I have to give Soul Mates: An Unforgettable Summer an overall rating of two teaspoons.

I really, really wanted to like this book. Partly because I wanted to have a glowing romance recommendation for Valentine’s Day, and partly because I do consider Rose a friend. But I just couldn’t. There were too many things for me to overlook, even when taking the struggle of independent publishing into account. I think Rose has a lot of potential, and I look forward to reading her work again in the future. I think she has so much room to grow and blossom.

Introduction

This week’s review is of Heirs of Eternity, by Franc Ingram. This is the first of two books in the Euphoria Duology. The second book, Kings of Euphoria, was released earlier this month. A full review of it is upcoming in this video/blog series.

Disclaimers & Disclosures

Full disclosure, I am personally acquainted with the author. We are in both in the AkroNaNoWrimo group for National Novel Writing Month and Facebook friends. This does not influence my opinions on the book, and I am receiving no compensation for this review, except maybe some free press. I say that assuming I’ll get linked from her blog. You will link me, won’t you, Franc? Pretty please?

About the Author

Franc is a local author from North East Ohio. She like good food, white wine, and has a dog named Mya. You can find her on Facebook, Goodreads, and her blog.

Book Details

First, how does this book only have two reviews on Amazon? I know more than two people have read this book. Only one review of the paperback on Barnes & Noble at this time of this writing.

Heirs of Eternity is available for sale in paperback ($10.90) on both Amazon and BN.com. It is available as an ebook for Kindle ($2.99, which is what I paid).

Amazon estimates the length of this book at 282 pages for the Kindle edition. The print edition weighs in at 279 pages.

Ratings

Design

I want to preface this section by saying that putting together an indie book is hard. Everything is done by the author or at the author’s expense. And unless you really love that sort of thing, typesetting and layout a print book is a chore. I’ve done it myself. It’s even worse when you don’t have the right software. So keep that in mind.

I have mixed feelings about this cover. The art has this dreamy quality that is enticing, but to be honest, I don’t think it fits the story. This book is jam-packed with action and monsters and heroes and cool SciFi stuff that borders on magic… But that just does not come across on this cover for me. Now, what it does have going for it, for those of you who watched/read my last review and know my pet peeve, is that it leaves the characters completely up to the readers’ imaginations.

It’s like, I don’t hate it, but I don’t think it’s strong or eye-catching for its genre. I think if I didn’t know Franc and know the book was out there, I probably would not have found this in the vast, vast world that is Amazon’s Kindle Store.

The interior design of the book isn’t great. It’s left aligned. The headings are nothing special, just bolded. It’s kind of like reading somebody’s term paper from a design standpoint. It doesn’t take away from your ability to read the book, but it doesn’t add anything either.

What I DO like about the interior is the spacer used between scene shifts within a chapter. The cool little pop of binary makes my nerd heart sing. For the enquiring minds that want to know, the little 100101 sequence seems to come out to a % in ASCII.

Premise

The story has a cool sci-fi fantasy premise. The science is kind of so far gone that it enters the realm of magic. To the average person who doesn’t understand, what the heirs can do really does seems like magic. The Masters of Earth, Skies, and Animals all have these powers that stem from being part supercomputer. I really the like idea behind the Heirs and the three kings with Oleana as their mentor. Where I struggle a bit is with the “ultras” the first generation hybrids mentioned in the blurb. Something about them just rubs me wrong, so that keeps premise from five teaspoons for me.

Characters

This story is extremely character driven. Oleana is a such a flawed character. And beautifully so. She’s a strong, but broken character, and that’s really what sells the story for me. She’s bearing the weight of the memory of their failures alone, and the memory of watching the other heirs die, repeatedly, just beats on her psyche. She struggles against addiction and the need to complete the job she’s been given.

Lorn, Lysander, and Leith are the other heirs. They didn’t come off as strong in this book for me, but I think book two is where they’re really going to come in to their own. I will be doing a review of it.

The other major character I want to talk about is the main villain, Cornelius. I’m sorry, Franc. That name just makes me chuckle so much, because all I can think about is the fairyprince from Warner Bros 1994 animated film, Thumelina. He’s supposed to be this big, bad ice-demi-god kind of thing, and all I see in my head is autumn fairyprince. To be fair, I’m probably the only person who makes that association, but it’s just hilarious to me. That aside, Cornelius doesn’t have much of a character arc. He’s a pretty typical maniacal all around bad guy who is drunk on power and wants to keep that power for himself. He sees the Heirs as a serious threat to that power.

So that’s the big conflicts of the story, Oleana against herself and Oleana against Cornelius. The two of them are diametrically opposed to one another.

There’s a lot of other characters in the book. The cast is quite wide. But we would be here all day if I tried to get into them all.

Worldbuilding

Once again, being scif-fi, worldbuilding is so important to the story. And the world is huge. Franc built a lot of world! It’s got different cultures, and you can see it in the places that the main characters travel to, and when they encounter the Failsea warriors. It’s a culturally rich book, which I enjoy. Again, the Ultras just kind of bug me, and that keeps it from being a perfect five for me. All in all, it’s a strong world, and I look forward to seeing it develop further in the second book.

Plot

It does have a twist at the end I didn’t see coming, so that was nice. It’s a pretty typical high-action adventure type plot with a journey. The plot really isn’t anything special, but events develop logically and it’s well paced.

Writing

The writing in this book is strong. It’s descriptive and emotive where it needs to be. Oleana’s struggles are well portrayed.

Final Thoughts – Overall

It was a strong story. I recommend it for fans of the sci-fi/fantasy genre. If you’re looking for hard sci-fi, probably not the book for you. I think if a second edition was released with a little more professional polish, the book would hit a solid five teaspoons for me.

If you are an indie or small press author and are interested in being featured in my reviews, please contact me at reviews@sara-cleveland.com with a subject line of “Hot Tea & Tall Tales Inquiry.” The subject line helps with inbox rules so I see your email faster.

For those of you who have been waiting patiently (or impatiently in some cases), here is a new sneak-peek excerpt from book two, Courting the Dragon.

As a reminder, anything posted is a draft, and therefore could be modified in the final published version. Please remember that this is my work, and I worked hard on it. Do not copy without expressed, written permission.

__________

The ballroom was a masterpiece of marble and granite. The vaulted ceilings, two stories high, glowed with reflected candlelight and reverberated with music and laughter. Between the enormous columns that held the ceiling aloft, tall windows and doors of expensive glass ringed three sides of the expansive room. Most of the doors, which led out into a private section of the palace grounds’ extensive gardens, were thrown wide open to relieve the oppressive heat of so many bodies.

Penelope had tried to find a quiet section of the garden to hole up in, thinking the outdoors would likely be deserted when all the excitement was inside. Most of the ladies wanted to be on the dance floor under the golden lights where their fancy dresses would be on display. Most of the male dandies weren’t much better, she admitted to herself ruefully.

Alas, that was not the case. The garden was doing an amazingly brisk business this evening as couples slipped off to find some space to get more intimately acquainted. After stumbling upon her third partially dressed pair of the evening, Penelope made her way back to the ballroom. Better to suffer the presence of her suitors than to feel the urge to scoop her own eyeballs out with a soup spoon. Or so she thought. She hadn’t taken three steps through the doors before two young men were asking her to dance. She declined demurely, but they followed her anyhow. She’d spent the better part of the last hour trying to rid herself of the hangers-on but had succeeded only in gaining a third.

A fourth voice interrupted the young lordlings’ chatter.

“May I have this dance, Your Highness?”

All three of her suitors rounded on the interloper with expressions of indignation, but Penelope smiled gratefully at him and held out her hand.

“I would be delighted, Your Grace.”

Salarath, in his Stellan persona, swept Penelope onto the dance floor and safely away from the stunned gazes of her admirers.

“Thank you,” she murmured as soon as they were out of earshot. The music was a pleasant dance of moderate speed that allowed for discussion and didn’t require Salarath to hold her too close. Still, a shiver of pleasure ran up her spine when his warm hand rested on her back.

“You looked like you could use a little help.”

“They are troublesome,” she admitted. “Since they know they have Father’s blessing they’re quite bold.”

“Who can blame them?” He paused to spin her around, continuing once she was back within his embrace. “It’s not every day they have a chance at the most beautiful woman in the kingdom.”

“Careful,” Penelope warned, a little smile on her lips. “It wouldn’t do for the Wizard Lord Stellan, Duke of Steelbourgh to be caught making lecherous advances on his goddaughter.”

Salarath snorted. “Perhaps I should have come as Stefan.”

“Father really would have turned you out.”

Warning: This does contain some minor spoilers. If you don’t want any part of the story spoiled, do not read any further.

Introduction

This week’s review is of the That Time I Broke Time, a debut novel by indie author Sarah Emily Lelonek. It is listed as YA and SciFi/Fantasy. Currently, it is enrolled in Kindle Select. Enrollment in this program means that it is only available for purchase through Amazon’s Kindle Store, or through Kindle Unlimited. I do not have a Kindle Unlimited subscription, so I paid the reasonable purchase price of $3.99 (at the time of this posting).

Disclaimers & Disclosures

Full disclosure, I am personally acquainted with the author. We are in both in the AkroNaNoWrimo group for National Novel Writing Month. This does not influence my opinions on the book, and I am receiving no compensation for this review, except maybe some free press (like a blog link, or a Facebook post. Twitter is nice 😉 )

About the Author

Sarah Emily Lelonek is a new author from Akron, Ohio. She holds a B.A. in English from Kent State University and M.Ed. in Higher Education Administration from Tiffin University. She has a yorkie named Joey.

Book Details

That Time that I Broke Time is estimated at 165 pages by Amazon. The typical reading time, again according to Amazon, is 3 hours and 18 minutes. I did not clock myself as I did not read the book all in one sitting, but I am a quick reader and this estimate seems fair. At the time of this writing, the book has one 5 star Amazon review.

While the book is currently only available as a Kindle ebook, Sarah says that she plans to release it as a paperback this coming April. I will attempt to remember to update this post with the additional availability. It is currently only available in English, and I am not aware of any plans for translation at this time.

A sequel is planned for later this year. I will attempt to remember to update this post when that becomes available. Also, I will do a review.

Ratings

Design

First, I will say that cover really fits the target genres. It’s got all the things I would look for as a reader in SciFi/Fantasy cover, particularly with a bent towards the YA portion of the genre. Color. Action. It makes me want to read the book.

One thing about the cover bugs me though, and I find that this is a common occurrence for me not only with indie books but with many, many traditionally published novels. The picture of the main character on the cover does not (to my mind) line up with the written description. Early in the story, Ellie describes her hair as “long, chestnut brown hair” and later as a “dark mane.” The girl on the cover is blond! Blond!

Okay, so that’s really just a pet peeve of mine, and it doesn’t detract from the fact that the cover is well done and eye-catching.

Four teaspoons.

The “interior,” if you will, is pretty much what you would expect from an ebook that has been put together well. The chapters are clearly delineated with pleasant looking headers, and scene shifts are well indicated. I’ve definitely come across ebooks where the latter was not the case, and it gave me a form of mental whiplash.

No teaspoons lost there.

Premise

The blurb reads:

The future doesn’t freak out Ellie Evensten. Being a product of the 2100s, Ellie is accustomed to hovers, holos, and even time travel. Ellie knows all about time travel from her adopted parents, but they didn’t mention how the time travel gene mutates with every generation of new travelers.

Now at age eighteen, Ellie is starting college with her best friend and boyfriend. Life is almost perfect. That is until she finds herself dealing with a whole new reality: Ellie is actually her parent’s birth child. She can not only time travel, but also break and bend time on her own volition.

Ellie’s life does not become easier with her new abilities. When Ellie’s parents are abducted, she not only faces an evil organization set on controlling time travelers worldwide, but she must also learn to cope with her own emotions before she breaks time for good.

There’s a whole lot of interesting stuff to dig into here, but let’s get this out of the way first: the book follows a trope. Well, a blend of tropes.

The protagonist discovers (bonus points for on a significant birthday) that she isn’t who she thought due to some secret about their family or the circumstances of her birth. Oh, and now she has awesome powers, too!

This has been done. And done. And done.

“Yer a wizard, ‘Arry!”

Here’s just a few other examples, besides J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter:

Rand Al’Thor in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time Series

Shea Ohmsford in Terry Brooks’ Sword of Shannara

Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa, and Anakin Skywalker (the whole dang family, really) in George Lucus’ Star Wars (the movies or the novelizations, take your pick).

Percy Jackson in Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians series

Diana Bishop in Deborah Harkness’ A Discovery of Witches

Richard Cypher in Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series.

I mean, I could go on for days. I didn’t even list all of the ones my friend helped me come up with when my brain got stuck.

But the reason it’s been done so many times is that. Heck, I even have an unfinished manuscript with the same trope! It’s a pretty good launchpad for all sorts of crazy adventures. Every story I just mentioned (aside from my unfinished one) is well beloved for totally different reasons, vastly different plots (although some do follow similar archetypes in other respects), in part because they all put their own twist on the trope.

In this case, the twist is that the protagonist is a carrier for time-traveling genetics that she had believed she could never have possessed, due to her parents faking her adoption. Points for originality, because I’ve read a lot of fantasy and sci-fi, and I can’t remember coming across that combination before. It’s an intriguing premise. The science behind the TT gene itself is glossed over (yay, suspension of disbelief!). And honestly, I’m glad the author chose not to just throw a bunch of physics babble in there and bullshit the reader through it. The main character didn’t know how it worked, admitted as much and we moved on.

But, while it’s not the hard and heavy footnote-laden steamroller that a Michael Crichton novel would be, That Time I Broke Time does it’s best to explore some of the big questions outside the protagonist’s own turmoil. In particular, the story tackles a big one: what would the governmental and societal reaction to such a power be?

So, the premise, in my opinion, is great. I give it five teaspoons. But now that leads us into the execution, and that is where many a grand premise goes to die. Bwahaha!

Okay, just kidding.

Characters

Main Protagonist – Eleanor “Ellie” Evensten

At the beginning of the story, Ellie is… how do I put this? I find her just annoying and self-absorbed, but in that I-just-turned-18 sort of way. The good thing about this is that it gave Ellie plenty of room to grow as a person from the first sentence to the last. What Ellie has going for her is a good character arc. And because we are in her head the whole time, we really get to see the changes in her as the plot moves forward. She shows progress as a character through the story as she begins to look outside of herself.

Main Antagonist – Kyle

Kyle starts out the story as Ellie’s boyfriend. Honestly, there doesn’t seem to be much to his character besides the fact that he’s a dick. I don’t even like having to say that word on camera, but it’s pretty much the best summary of his persona there is. However, Kyle doesn’t spend too much time on screen, and I find his flatness forgivable, especially since the real villain of the story is much more complex.

Ellie’s Family

I’m just going to lump all the Evenstens together here. Ellie’s family is supportive almost to the point of being irritating. I don’t think they actually reprimand her for a single thing the entire story, even when they probably should have. They’re very loving, doting parents, but again, they seem a bit flat as characters despite the absolutely freaking massive secret they’ve been keeping from their daughter. Grandpa, too. He seems to lack some depth for the badass he seems to be. I’m hoping for some more development of Gramps in the next installment.

Ellie’s Friends

The best friend (Nat), the childhood best friend (Taylor), and the new probably future bestie (Ying) to round it out. The friends where just interesting enough not to be complete paper-cutouts for me. I feel like you could replace a couple of them with totally different people and I don’t think it would have affected the story much, if at all. Moving on.

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All in all, Ellie’s strong character arc is what saved this portion for me. Everybody else just felt a bit flat for one reason or another. Still, it feels like there’s some great potential in some of the side characters. I really hope they get a chance to shine in the future. Three teaspoons.

Worldbuilding

I teetered between 3 and 4 teaspoons for this section.

In any kind of fiction, but particularly speculative fiction, worldbuilding is paramount. You have to make enough of the world feel real that the reader can suspend their disbelief for the really crazy parts. That Time I Broke Time seems (most of the time) to find a nice balance between overt in-your-face acts of worldbuilding (hover cars, because future) and subtly (like the evolution in teen/college-age alcohol/drug culture). There was obviously a lot of thought put into several key aspects of the world in which Ellie lives. The society and governmental structures that have formed in this world are well thought-out and make sense (at least to me) given the technologies described. But then there are some things that just seem like they were popped in as either being throw-away, expected because of the future-world premise, or plot crutches, which we’ll talk about in the next section.

I think the thing that put the worldbuilding over the top for me and into the solid 4 teaspoons was the International Time Traveling Organization (ITTO) and its genuine nefariousness. It’s all the the terrible things that can go wrong with a governmental body with too much power and not enough oversight. The true evil in the story, the ITTO as a natural result of the TT gene is what makes this story for me. It answers the big “so what?” about time travel. We have humans with the super-ish ability to go back in time? So what? We have to regulate them! But where do we draw the lines? I’m so excited to see where this goes and how it develops in the sequel.

Plot

This is another section where I teetered on what score to give. I’m going with the 3 teaspoons, and here’s why.

On one hand, the story keeps moving. It’s well paced. It’s slower where it needs to be and faster where it needs to be. The action is good. There’s a good level of anticipation and suspense.

And yet.

Some things in this book were just too dang easy. The “modern” medicine really just felt like a crutch. There’s an entire scene based around it that I felt could have just been completely skipped. Like, completely, and nothing would have been lost from the story.

Some of the help the receive is also just, so convenient. I would have liked to see more trial and error, more struggle for the characters.

Writing

First, let me start by saying that Sarah is a talented writer. Her writing has a clear voice and presence. She does well with evoking all five of the senses. By the end of the first digital page, I had a strong sense that I was going to enjoy this book on pure style alone. And she didn’t disappoint.

I did notice a handful of editing mistakes, but honestly, they were minor enough that I didn’t even care. If I had not written down reminders and highlighted them all on my Kindle I probably would have forgotten all about them. I’ve seen far more egregious mistakes in professionally published books that went through only heaven knows how many rounds of editing, copying editing, and proofing. Heck, my own debut novel probably has worse editing mistakes. I’m too much of a coward to look at this point because there are so many print copies already out in the world.

Final Thoughts – Overall Rating

I liked this book. I’ll be honest, I originally didn’t think that I would. That Time I Broke Time was a fun read. It’s not overly lengthy, and can be enjoyed of an evening if you’re a quick reader. It’s well written and well put-together. Although it could have used some fortification in some areas, the plot was interesting, and the premise was stellar.

A note on the genre labeling, to those who are wondering if this book is appropriate for their teenagers. While this book is targeted to a YA audience (according to Amazon), if I were personally asked to label this book, I would call it New Adult (NA). Sarah does not shy away from the profanity. There were a few f-bombs within the first five or so chapters. The first chapters show some questionable behavior (drinking, substance use) before getting into some rather adult stuff. If your child is less than 15 I would consider pre-screening the book first.

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